Walter Mischel: The Marshmallow Test

About the book

Again this time I read the book in Kindle format. It reminded me a lot of the days I was studying psychology. Expect this book is written in with individual touch by the way that the writer shares his own personal experiences. In that sense it’s more a self-help book than a course book for studying psychology.

Shakespeare: ”All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”

How was the actual reading of the book?

Mischel has divided the book into three parts. First one explains results of different studies. Second part dives into different solutions. The third one is summary and conclusions.

Reading of the book is inspiring. It’s just like Kahneman’s great book. Scientific without the academic nuances. Mischel’s main theory can help people to understand his or hers hot and cool actions. Hot actions are temptations and cool decisions are rational choices. It also gives a great opportunity to develop different strategies for personal development or even ways to work with other people’s development. Especially children. The book could be also seen as tutorial to psychology. The reader can scratch the surface of behavioristic psychology without bothered any heavy lectures of main stream theories. 

Less inspiring the book is when the writer shares the same observations in different forms. Luckily the writer points out why some observations are delt numerous times.

What are the key learnings of the book? 

Key learnings can be categorized into four main elements: 

It’s all about self-control

• Beating your personal best becomes the moving target
• Self-control is a skill and that can be learned 

Now vs. later?

• You have a winning formula if you have sense or understanding that potentially later will bring better results than now.
• You will fulfil your goals if you have the self-control and motivation work based on the understanding
• The more you can connect to future of yours, the more you are willing to invest into the future 

Pursuing goals and behavior

• Behavior is crucial for pursuing goals and it can be predicted and steered.
• Strategies and tools for personal development are easy to access. Understanding ones actions can be monitored with diaries and based on the findings one can develop if-then –strategies.

• Age is not an obstacle on having a good working memory. By exercising and minimizing loneliness one can keep the working memory up and running.
• By pre-living different situations you can understand the end-results of your actions  

Fundamental value of self-control is to cool now and heat the later.

• Self-control is a key to success. It starts a process that cools ones thinking and regulates hot thinking.
• If one can delay urge to fulfil temptations, most probably one can also see the benefit of delayed gratification. And by that way he can pursuit higher goals than just fulfilling temptations.
• Are low delayers losers? Yes, based on the data. But no if they can develop ways on steering their own behavior. We all have our personal behavioral signature which triggers if-then –patterns. Knowledge of different if-then -strategies will help to delay unwanted temptations.

How should we change according to the book?

We should not overvalue the immediate rewards and discount the value of delayed rewards. Dollar today is worth more that dollar tomorrow?

What should I personally do?  

I should study the things that I’m not good at (ref. Carl Jung).

Summary

Walter Mischel sheds light to an important phenomenon of human beings. His studies can build foresight into our actions. Based on Mischel’s book we can:

• Understand our self-control abilities and measure our willpower capabilities
• Analyze our hot and cool areas of decision
• Make an if-then –plan to resist unwanted hot decisions and to endorse desired cool decisions.

The book in six words: Find and develop your behavioral signature